Canadian entertainer/actor Don Harron has died, aged 90. Harron passed away surrounded by family at his home in Toronto, Canada on Saturday (17Jan15) after opting against having treatment for cancer.
His daughter Martha says, "He was still sharp. He was still capable of being funny even though his voice was barely above a whisper... It's horribly sad, but it's beautiful too."
Harron is best known for his comic alter ego Charlie Farquharson, the country bumpkin who first appeared on a Canadian television revue in 1952, before making regular appearances on U.S. country music variety series Hee Haw between 1969 and 1982. He also wrote more than 10 books as Farquharson.
Harron also portrayed other characters in a number of TV series during his eight-decade entertaining career, enjoying guest stints on Dr. Kildare, The F.B.I., The Man From U.N.C.L.E., 12 O'Clock High and Mission: Impossible.
He wrote many episodes for Hee Haw, directed a TV musical adaptation of classic novel Anne of Green Gables in 1955 and later helped bring the production to the stage.
In later years, Harron was honoured with membership of the Order of Ontario and Order of Canada and he was inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010.
He had three daughters, including Mary Harron, who wrote and directed Christian Bale's thriller American Psycho.

Actress/screenwriter Leigh Chapman has died at the age of 75. The star passed away at her West Hollywood home on 4 November (14), following an eight-month battle with cancer, according to Variety.com.
Chapman began her career as an actress in U.S. TV series Ripcord.
She went on to appear in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Iron Horse and Land's End.
In addition to acting, Chapman also worked as a screenwriter on several projects, including Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and The Octagon.

TV director/writer Theodore J. Flicker has died at the age of 84. Flicker passed away in his sleep in Sante Fe, New Mexico on Friday (12Sep14), after a battle with hypersensitivity pneumonitis, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The New Jersey native began his career in the 1950s after studying at London's prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, becoming one of the early members of the Compass Players improv comedy troupe in Chicago, Illinois. He also directed the Broadway musical adaptation of his The Nervous Set.
In 1964, he transitioned into movies and TV and went on to write and direct several films and shows, including The Troublemaker, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Streets of San Francisco.
Flicker also appeared onscreen in Night Gallery, Beware! The Blob and The Legend of the Lone Ranger.
He also created beloved TV comedy Barney Miller, which ran from 1975 to 1982.

Kiefer Sutherland's 24 character Jack Bauer has topped a new poll to find U.S. TV's Greatest Action Hero. The tough guy has beaten out Sarah Michelle Gellar's Buffy Summers and Adam West's Batman in the new TV Guide magazine survey.
Richard Dean Anderson's MacGyver and Diana Rigg's Avengers character Emma Peel round out the top five, while The Six Million Dollar Man's Steve Austin (Lee Majors), Alias' Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'s Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum) make the top 10.

Actor Robert Vaughn performed all his own action scenes in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. because his stuntman was often too drunk. The veteran actor was keen to avoid doing his own stunts in the cult 1960s crime-fighting show but he was left with no choice but to shoot the action scenes himself because of his booze-loving double.
Vaughn tells U.K. TV show Loose Women, "I had stunt people, yes, but he generally wasn't sober, so I had to do them all. I did all the stunts myself."

Everett Collection
Turning a '60s television show into a major motion picture is a risky proposition. While it has worked on occasion, like in the cases of The Fugitive or Mission: Impossible, far more often the end result has been a disaster. Bewitched, Dark Shadows, The Green Hornet, Lost in Space, Get Smart… the list goes on and on. Even one of the successes — The Brady Bunch Movie — had to resort to parody to make it work. The spotty track record hasn't stopped studios from developing properties that they already own, mostly because it's a cheap way to get source material. This is how Guy Ritchie's latest movie ended up being a reworking of the nearly forgotten '60s spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E..
In the original, Robert Vaughn starred as Napoleon Solo (one of the coolest TV character names ever), with NCIS's David McCallum as Illya Kuryakinm, his Russian partner in spying for the international United Network Command for Law Enforcement. At the height of the Cold War, it was a sensational prospect to have agents from the United States and Soviet Union working together to thwart a secret evil organization called THRUST.
Ritchie, however, has experience with making material that could easily be antiquated into something more in tune with a modern audience. After all, he turned Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law into a pair of bare-knuckle brawlers in his Sherlock Holmes films. Who's to say that the British director can't turn Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) and Armie Hammer (The Lone Ranger) into a badass version of Solo and Kuryakin? Sure, the fact that both Cavill and Hammer have failed to engage audiences when they've headlined big budget fare should be a concern, but Ritchie was married to Madonna and once had Brad Pitt go an entire movie talking in an unintelligible Irish accent… he's not above taking on a challenge.
The main thing that The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has going for it — much like Mission: Impossible — is that espionage really never goes out of style. Deceit, disguises and gadgets make for some handy story building blocks no matter what the set-up is. The trick is almost to ignore much of what came before in the original television show and start from scratch. Reportedly, Ritchie is keeping the story set in the '60s, but hopefully that won't steer his story too rigidly. The best movies based on TV shows, like The Fugitive, make people almost entirely forget where the story came from.
The worst mistake that Ritchie could make would be to try to be too jokey with the material. What comes out of a lot of the television-to-movie projects is that the participants are embarrassed to be doing them and almost feel the need to make fun of their source. Ritchie has proven himself adept at adding touches of humor to his films, usually amidst a steady stream of fights and explosions. For U.N.C.L.E., any jokes need to naturally flow out of the story and action… try to force anything and suddenly the film's either a parody or a pale imitation of the original.
It's an uphill battle to get audiences to care about something that their grandparents watched on television, but Ritchie has more of a chance to pull it off than most. If he can make the 1870s look cool, just think what he can do with London at the beginning of the swinging '60s. Even if Cavill and Hammer haven't yet earned the benefit of the doubt, their director has.
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Eric Bercovici, the screenwriter who adapted and produced James Clavell's novel Shogun into an epic mini-series, has died, aged 80. He passed away at his home in Hawaii on Thursday (20Feb14).
Shogun was a critically-savaged ratings winner when it aired in the U.S. in 1980, and became the biggest success of Bercovici's career.
The writer was the son of screenwriter Leonardo Bercovici. He studied at Yale University and set out to follow in his father's footsteps, but his own screenwriting career was derailed when his dad was blacklisted as part of Hollywood's McCarthy-era communist witchhunt.
Bercovici opted to work in Europe and wrote episodes of I Spy and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Actor Frank Marth has died. He was 91. The Honeymooners star passed away at his home in California on Sunday (12Jan14) after a battle with congestive heart failure and Alzheimer's disease.
The New Yorker started his career on the stage before making his TV debut in 1949's Mama. He went on to appear alongside Jackie Gleason in his 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners, playing various characters in a recurring role.
Marth also appeared in shows such as The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Quincy M.E. and Airwolf.
His film credits include Madame X, Pendulum, The Lost Man and 1994's Loving Deadly, which was his final movie.
Marth is survived by his wife of 45 years, actress Hope Holiday.

Veteran actress Mary Carver has died following a brief illness. The Arachnophobia star died on 18 October (13). She was 89.
Carver is perhaps best known for her role as Cecilia Simon in long-running TV series Simon & Simon, which starred Gerald McRaney and Jameson Parker as detective brothers.
She also appeared as Goldie Hawn's mum in Protocol and featured in From Here to Eternity, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and 1995's Safe.
Her TV career included stints on The Donna Reed Show, The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek: Enterprise.

NBC
John Davis, executive producer of 'The Blacklist' and founder of Davis Entertainment with over 40 movie projects in various stages of development, gives us a page from his producer’s playbook and shares his views on what it takes to make it in Hollywood. To read the full story, check it out at Studio System News!

Synopsis

The adventures of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, agents of U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law Enforcement), as they battle the evils of T.H.R.U.S.H., a rival organization bent on world domination.